Slashdot Mirror
Archive.org Deploys Macromedia Software Titles
Jon-Erik Hexum writes "Now at the internet archive, the new software section contains over 10,000 CD-ROM titles donated by Macromedia. In an interesting discussion, the Software Archive is struggling with deciding on the best method for preserving CD-ROM images for the long term."
Punch cards!
they have these little, thin Plastic things called 'Compact Disks'...
Oh, wait...
Lagito ergo expectabo
The best way to preserve this media would be over a distributed network. People sign up to voulenteer space on their computers and then download only the media they want to archive. To retrieve the information, have a simple search client that will show you who has that information...Oh wait, that's just a P2P network.
Jason
ProfQuotes
They should burn the CD images to CDs.
I'm obviously out of the loop here....
What the heck are on those 10,000 cds (cd's?) anyways, and why is it so cool? Games? MP3s? Movies? Pr0n?
LongTail SSH Brute Force analysis tool is here!
"Hey! I have 10.000 CDs with software to share!"
While I was indulging my data storage daydreams, I came across a discussion board thread which talks about the various issues surround storing digital media (pictures, in this case). It was pretty intersting reading. I hadn't thought about gold-plated CDs before, and that sounds like a great idea as long as the hardware to read them exists for the duration of the media's shelf life. Even NASA has been having trouble in that area.
At first blush, I'd say the way to save all the images would be some sort of distrubuted filesystem, a la Freenet. Package an ASCII metafile with the ROMs file format info along with the actual image file and that should do it. Some sort of centralized system of making sure that at least N copies exist in "the wild" and the data could be reasonably safe. I'm oversimplifying, of course, but it occurred to me that data integrity and file formats might not be the only barriers to long-term data storage. Governments aren't especially data-friendly 100% of the time, either. If you really want to save data for all posterity, you have to protect it from yourself as well.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
deciding on the best method for preserving CD-ROM images for the long term
.iso format. It's only physical media that will change, but with virtual drives, the iso format won't be unreadable!
Keep them in the standard
As the article stands, we have no idea if this story is a genuine big deal or something we can all ignore.
INTERNET Jan 29: Today Popular News Website Slashdot announced the Slashdot Server Benchmarking System. From their FAQ:
How do we use your system ?
We provide this service as a tool for analyzing the strength of your server. To use our service, simply pick up a random story from the internet and send it to us. We will post the story and the time taken to bring down your server is inversely proportional to the strength of your server. For best results, choose stories that contain evil news about M$, RIAA or USPTO. For advanced options...
Slashdot demonstrated their system by posting links from Archive.org. The site was brought down in less than a minute. Many server manufacturers all over the world thanked Slashdot for providing such a wonderful service. "We see this as an opportunity to serve news to the world and testing our servers at the same time...", said Slash Dottroll, Product Manager at IBM Server Division.
getSexySig();
Here is the Google cache showing the breakdown of titles by category.
* 3D (35)
* Adv/Mkt Collateral (37)
* Audio (8)
* Business Ap (370)
* CBT (897)
* Collection (7)
* Commercial Design (45)
* Corporate (179)
* Demo (27)
* Editorial (15)
* Education (61)
* Educational (1355)
* Educational MM (178)
* Educational Multimedia (47)
* Edutainment (466)
* Entertainment (788)
* File Types (0)
* Fine Art (60)
* Government (1)
* Illustration (58)
* Interactive Business (482)
* Interactive Portfolio (11)
* Interactive Reference (185)
* Kidsware (238)
* Marketing Collateral (61)
* Non-commercial (93)
* Photo Manipulation (15)
* Promotion (24)
* Promotional (829)
* Reference (354)
* Self Promotion (9)
* Shocked Sites (81)
* Tool (2)
* Training (4)
* Type Design (21)
* Uncategorized (1361)
* Web Page/Site (59)
It doesn't appear that Macromedia is donating software, but rather a collection of Flash/Dreamweaver/Shockwave/Whatever projects that were 'Created with Macromedia'
Here's the google cache:
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
10,000 CD-ROMs <= 10,000*700MB = 7 TB
That isn't too much by today's standards, is it? Esp. considering you only need read-only access
Not a bad plan, though. Though I would go one step further and convert any data still readable into a format that includes a description of itself. This would mean that every video/audio/image should have it's own decoder attached. HTML files would have the HTML spec. This may seem like a huge waste of space, especially on smaller files, but it is worth it for the time saved reading files later on. Of course, you need something that can always read the description, but one standard program could function for all files in this format instead of countless files. Now, this doesn't help for executables (currently, anyway) but could improve data retention.
As storage availabilities and requirements rise, an encoder/decoder for many formats would become trivial, notable exceptions being made for massively integrated applications (*cough* Office *cough*)
After all, how do you think Star Trek managed to take 50,000 year-old data crystals and read the files stored on them, or interface with Borg computers? : )
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
... was a tale from Philip K. Dick where music was encoded to animals or dna or something like that.
If you want to preserve something forever, encode it in a DNA form (I think that most of DNA code is inactive, so there are plenty of space), grow an live thing from it, and while descendents last, your software will survive.
A word of caution: don't try this with Microsoft software, the world have enough bugs already.
Slashdotted? that's ok.. we'll just look up the page on archive.org..
oh, wait.
I havent seen the list of 10,000 titles as the site is /.'ed But, um, is it crap we really want to keep anyway? I mean, history and time has a way of filtering crap out that isnt worth much and preserving that which is. The worthy will stay, the unworth won't. It may seem noble to try to preserve EVERYTHING, but whats really the point? When was the last time you REALLY needed AutoDesk Animator Pro v1.0 for DOS? Im sure some jackass will try to prove me wrong with an anecdote of how his lucky copy of OS/2 2.1 on 5.25" floppies saved a business, but generally speaking, maybe they should work to preseve 50 of the titles, rather than 10,000. There will be some loss, but we'll get over it.
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
- Mutations - Happen all the time, look at albinos.
- Introns - Mutations are limited in practice because of introns, sections of DNA that don't encode proteins. IIRC, introns are a huge portion of all DNA, and mutations within them go completely unchecked. (Since they don't encode anything, mutations in introns don't express themselves, and thus don't effect the living creature positively or negatively.)
While it's a neat idea, I wouldn't but any more trust in DNA than my stack of C-64 disks, especially over several generations.-sk
hey all, I'm the volunteer at the Internet Archive who posted the 'call for comments' message on their CD-ROM forums, and I just wanted to clarify a couple of things: - the archive consists of CD-ROMs created by third parties with the 'Made For Macromedia' program, as another poster said. So it's all multimedia software created with Macromedia tools - basically, everything sent to Macromedia for approval between certain dates. Macromedia kindly donated this to the Internet Archive. - right now it's largely a physical archive, not a digital one - the content is still on the source CD-ROMs. - i'm a volunteer in the VERY early stages of looking at the Macromedia CD-ROM archive - in fact, my first day. i surface from the pile of software boxes to discover my call for archiving suggestions has slashdotted the site. hurrah! - there are currently only a couple of disc images downloadable from the site. they were put up last year, and I wouldn't recommend downloading them for now, since there's some compatibility and completeness issues with them. - most of the discs are either multimedia (like virtual guides to Jerusalem, educational guides) or what you might call ephemera (promotional CD-ROMs) The Internet Archive doesn't have any rights to post any of them online right now. - future plans would ideally include making some of these CDs available to the public for either remote access or download, providing the correct rights issues could be dealt with. With the shelf life of CDs somewhat of an unknown factor, creating digital archives of these discs and making sure they're preserved for future generations is important. Thanks, Simon.
hey all,
I'm the volunteer at the Internet Archive who posted the 'call for comments' message on their CD-ROM forums, and I just wanted to clarify a couple of things:
- the archive consists of CD-ROMs created by third parties with the 'Made For Macromedia' program, as another poster said. So it's all multimedia software created with Macromedia tools - basically, everything sent to Macromedia for approval between certain dates. Macromedia kindly donated this to the Internet Archive.
- right now it's largely a physical archive, not a digital one - the content is still on the source CD-ROMs.
- i'm a volunteer in the VERY early stages of looking at the Macromedia CD-ROM archive - in fact, my first day. i surface from the pile of software boxes to discover my call for archiving suggestions has slashdotted the site. hurrah!
- there are currently only a couple of disc images downloadable from the site. they were put up last year, and I wouldn't recommend downloading them for now, since there's some compatibility and completeness issues with them.
- most of the discs are either multimedia (like virtual guides to Jerusalem, educational guides) or what you might call ephemera (promotional CD-ROMs) The Internet Archive doesn't have any rights to post any of them online right now.
- future plans would ideally include making some of these CDs available to the public for either remote access or download, providing the correct rights issues could be dealt with. With the shelf life of CDs somewhat of an unknown factor, creating digital archives of these discs and making sure they're preserved for future generations is important.
Thanks,
Simon.